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Inside Paul Allen's Quest To Reverse Engineer The Brain

Behind a black curtain in a small room a titanium sapphire laser is prepared to fire at a tiny and very surprising target: a half-centimeter glass window surgically implanted into the skull of a live mouse. If all goes right the laser will fire for a quadrillionth of a second while the mouse runs on a white, treadmill-like ball and watches a computer screen. Thanks to special dyes, certain brain cells will glow green if the mouse is using them, their image captured by cameras capable of detecting a single photon.

The point to all this Star Trek style technology could not be more profound. That tiny tangle of tissue in the mouse’s skull turns nerve impulses from the rodent’s eyes into an interaction. Decoding that process would give scientists the first true window into how a mammalian brain experiences the world.

It has a secondary benefit, too. Looking over the contraption puts a big–and pretty rare–smile on the face of Paul Allen, the 59-year-old Microsoft cofounder who has plowed $500 million into the Allen Institute for Brain Science, a medical Manhattan Project that he hopes will dwarf his contribution as one of the founding fathers of software. The institute, scattered through three buildings in Seattle’s hip Fremont neighborhood, is primarily focused on creating tools, such as the mouse laser, which is technically a new type of microscope, that will allow scientists to understand how the soft, fleshy matter inside the human skull can give rise to the wondrous, mysterious creative power of the human mind.

“As an ex-programmer I’m still just curious about how the brain functions, how that flow of information really happens,” says Allen in a rare interview, in a conference room overlooking an active ship canal. “The thing you realize when you get into studying neuroscience, even a little bit, is that everything is connected to everything else. So it’s as if the brain is trying to use everything at its disposal–what it is seeing, what it is hearing, what is the temperature, past experience. It’s using all of this to try to compute what the animal should do next, whether that animal is a mouse or human being.”

It’s heavy stuff, fueled by curiosity and scientific ambition made yet weightier by issues of mortality and the neuro-fragility Allen’s own brain has been coping with. In June his mother, Faye Allen, a schoolteacher who inculcated him with a love of books and knowledge, died of Alzheimer’s. “Any time you’ve seen a loved one…,” Allen says, trailing off. “You see their personality, everything that makes them human, slowly slipping away, and there is nothing you can do about it.” And Allen himself has waged a fight against stage four non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, a deadly blood cancer that is now in remission. He is flush and energetic, juggling our interview with phone calls about one of his sports teams, and filled with urgency about his legacy.

His first $100 million investment in the Allen Institute resulted in a gigantic computer map of how genes work in the brains of mice, a tool that other scientists have used to pinpoint genes that may play a role in multiple sclerosis, memory and eating disorders in people. Another $100 million went to creating a similar map of the human brain, already resulting in new theories about how the brain works, as well as maps of the developing mouse brain and mouse spinal cord. These have become essential tools for neuroscientists everywhere.

Now Allen, the 20th-richest man in America, with an estimated net worth of $15 billion, has committed another $300 million for projects that will make his institute more than just a maker of tools for other scientists, hiring several of the top minds in neuroscience to spearhead them. One effort will try to understand the mouse visual cortex as a way to understand how nerve cells work in brains in general. Other projects aim to isolate all the kinds of cells in the brain and use stem cells to learn how they develop. Scientists think there may be 1,000 of these basic building blocks, but they don’t even know that. “In software,” Allen says, “we call it reverse engineering.”

The willingness to fund these projects has gained Allen a growing number of disciples. “Paul has become a hero to me,” says David Anderson, a professor at Caltech who first proposed the mouse map project to Allen. “He’s done something for science in a way that very few other philanthropists have. It required that he have faith in science and go where his curiosity guides him.”

But there are also doubts about whether his new, grander plans will amount to anything. “The first phase of their investment really worked out,” says Susumu Tonegawa, an MIT professor and winner of a 1987 Nobel Prize who has done extensive brain research. But can Allen’s industrial approach really solve the mystery of how the brain creates consciousness? “It’s one of the biggest unresolved issues in brain research,” he says. “Whether it will work or not, I don’t know.”

Health issues have defined Allen’s career for the past three decades. He left Microsoft after beating Hodgkin’s lymphoma in 1982 and never returned. Bill Gates would turn Microsoft into one of the most essential companies of the 20th century, while Allen, whose shares continued to soar, spent billions on various passions. There were sports teams (the Portland Trail Blazers and the Seattle Seahawks), cable companies (Charter Communications, on which he lost $8 billion) and research labs (the for-profit Interval Research, shut down in 2000). There was the first privately funded human spaceflight and the search for extraterrestrial life. There was the Gehry-designed EMP Museum, which the electric guitar buff originally built in part as a tribute to fellow Seattle native Jimi Hendrix. There was one of the largest yachts in the world, the Tatoosh, a 300-foot beauty with a 6-foot shaded swimming pool and a saloon that features a French limestone fireplace.

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10% tax on Net Worth of $1.1 billion and above. Includes any trusts or charities owned or controlled. That way they can’t hide behind those entities with lavish perks that they create for themselves, like buildings (or hide art collections).

So Bill Gates has personal NW of $54 billion plus controls his charity of $25 billion, so he would owe a tax of $7.9 billion on his $79 billion. Every year until he gets to $1.1 billion!

Warren Buffet said that once you reach $500 million in NW there is pretty much nothing you can’t buy. With the exemption of $1.1 billion Bill Gates and the like will still have plenty of NW left to rule the world!

Think of it like property taxes on your house. To be fair, the inheritance tax should be eliminated.

It is very commendable that someone of great personal wealth would invest in something that would be of benefit to all mankind. Likely, the most beneficial scientific achievement of all time will be the ability to program cells. This type of research is a stepping stone to that ability. This is research that would not likely be done with any efficiency by government, but is too expensive for small laboratories. We should all feel a sense of gratitude toward Paul Allen.

My last pay check was $9500 working 12 hours a week online. My sisters friend has been averaging 15k for months now and she works about 20 hours a week. I can’t believe how easy it was once I tried it out. This is what I do, bit.ly/Oe3iHo

What you will find if you look deep enough is conscienceness. Science defines life as something almost mechanical, it’s much more. Our window of opportunity is quite narrow. The prime of life changes shape as we age. Wisdom Starks to kick in while we are in our 30 ‘s and takes center stage as we grow older. And then it seems like time is up… That’s the part I don,t quite understand. We’re given an average of 74 years here, and I can accept our mortality, but I have trouble with our brain shutting off in the final years. I guess the secrete is to give something back while we can to add to the next generation. Good luck mr. Allen on your research, I do wish you the best luck.

If Mr. Allen really wants to get a grip on the brain inner works, he needs to look no further: The Tibetan monks reach meditation levels of above 45 hrz. Another issue he could focus on is the effects of neural therapy on neuronal synapses. Regarding the pesky Alzheimers, it all comes down as to how to dilute the beta amyloid plaques responsible for it. Perhaps a drug or a nano device could help. www.tangledsynapses.com

What Paul could consider is supplementing the science with humanism, without the religious acrimony.

If we genetically become each other’s keeper – which is as easy as DNA stewardship – our species persona will change. Then, allow a modern-day version of the Jesuits to administer our journey to the stars – with everyone on board. And in the meantime see to it that all humans enjoy 1000 summers on planet Earth.

The Billion dollar question is why Mr. Allen persists in this mono-cultural medieval blacksmithery trying to understand a jet engine? The courage of the greatest minds to brave the new World without the safety of Academic tenure is not so awesome since they compete for sustenance with the minor intellects who have reached the level of high school bullies and know personal politics.

The big hammer is independent science is fundamentally marginalized. Science has been co-opted as a Corporate Tool since Wall Street corporate lawyers Nixon and John Mitchell created the EPA in 1970 as they were prosecuting Vietnam for resource control by force rather than by gamesmanship.

Approval is as approval directs the outcome.

More importantly for the development of knowledge; paradigms are systemically reinforced proportional to the big money which feeds them.

The real magic is how great ideas come from out of nowhere with minimal tools.

There is not one mention of understanding human brain topology by Species Awareness. Environmental-brain damage by long-term immersion in cognitive dissonance space is not well-explored.

A classic Greek Tragic waste of EULA cash; reminds me of watching the gold dust blow back to the mountains in the “Treasure of the Sierra Madre”.